I don’t use Heartlands to rant much, right? O yeah, there was that time. But, listen, there’s a new rhetorical bugaboo I need to brood about. I’m deeply concerned about ‘deeply.’ It’s not so much the adverb’s connection to words like ‘grateful’ and phrases like ‘I love you.’ It’s particularly problematic when it worms its […]
Earl Swift spent the better part of a year on Tangier Island and grew to love the people and the culture of the place. But when he wrote about the experience for his new book, his takeaway was not subtle. It’s there in the title. He believes the island is not long for this world. […]
The best way to understand the ending of There, There, Tommy Orange’s new novel, is to remember that the bullets were always coming. Orange tells you this in the non-fiction prologue to the book where he describes what it’s like to be a Native American today. The Europeans who ‘settled’ the land “fired their guns […]
It’s all here. Beginnings and endings. Heaven and hell. Divine intentions and bodily appetites. That’s what you get with the poet Scott Cairns. Look for the kitchen sink. I’m sure it’s in there, too. Recently I came back for a season to Philokalia: New & Selected Poems, Cairns’ 2002 collection. It’s as rich and evocative […]
One of my great unfinished reading projects is The Works of John Wesley. A long row of books from the series lines one of my shelves these days holding the collected works of the principal founder of Methodism including sermons, journal entries, and minutes of the first conferences. This week I received Volume 32: Medical […]
What if we ran out of stories? It doesn’t seem like we’re any danger of that. Netflix announced earlier this year that it was going to spend $8 billion on original content in 2018. Other media outlets are increasing their output. Even amateurs with a smartphone are producing YouTube series. Our appetite for stories doesn’t […]
The New Testament, as translated by the influential Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart, is bad. But that’s what makes it such a good read for Christians who need their settled understandings tweaked. Hart’s new translation doesn’t strive for literary heights. He has an ear for beautiful language, something that comes through in all of his […]
However St. George died, (and the catalogues of his gruesome tortures are legion), he was reputedly hard to keep down. “The king ordered that the saint be placed in the olive press,” one story goes, “until his flesh was torn to pieces and he died. They then threw him out of the city, but the […]
Heartlands 